What drives a poor reputation for the Rogue class?

[LudicSavant]

Okay, say we want to avoid a high density of alarms.

Well, what kinds of alarms? The Alarm spell? A heavy vault door that grinds loudly when opened? Shriekers? A Magic Mouth that announces visitors? A stretch of wide open terrain overlooked by a well-staffed watchtower? A green dragon's regional effect? A burrowing creature with tremorsense on the prowl? Bounty hunters trying to track the PC on the wanted poster, one with wilderness tracking skills, another by consulting their god, a third by summoning an Invisible Stalker? An area choked with webs and populated by creatures with Web Sense? A mighty sphinx at the gate ready with a riddle? One of the hostages is actually a shapechanger plant? Mooks regularly checking if the treasure is still there, then waking up the guy who knows Locate Object if it's not? A door sealed with Arcane Lock and three Glyphs of Warding on it?

There's a lot of different forms that alarms take, and there's no guarantee that Reliable Talent in a particular skill will resolve it. Even something as relatively simple as 'a watchtower with a good vantage point:' okay, I can probably pass the guard's Passive Perception, but do I have a feature that lets me even attempt to hide in plain sight in the first place (like Soulknife 13)? Can I bring the party with me, or am I doing a lone scout thing? What sort of actions can I take against the guys in the watchtower without breaking stealth? Do I have a feature that can prevent trackers from following my footsteps, since hide checks specifically don't apply to that? It's not like these things don't come up, the DMG specifically calls out monsters tracking PCs for a reason.

All of this is to say that things don't begin and end at 'make a stealth check.' It's more complex and interesting than that. (As an aside, this is also why PWT, while very strong, is not the auto-win it is sometimes made out to be -- a lot of stuff can still detect you, which is probably why the designers were okay with it in the first place).

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Okay, so let's talk about Reliable Talent. Just how reliable is it, actually? If this is the feature that we're leaning on to let us keep up with the entire kit of Tier 3+ Bards then it's gotta be doing some really, really heavy lifting, because this is at a point where the Bard's sittin' on a mountain and it's just going rapidly ascend from there.

Reliable Talent is worth ~+2 to an open roll on average, or ~+0.7 to one with an advantage (which I often do if I'm specializing in a skill and tier 3+).

But let's get specific. Say I'm level 11 and I have an Investigation modifier of +9 (+4 prof, +4 expertise, +1 Int) and I wanna uncover some of these darned alarms.

Is it a passive check, such as the book advises to use if you "continually search" or for "things where the DM might not want to reveal the result" (such as for a hidden alarm)? Then Reliable Talent doesn't help me.

Is it an active check, and the DC is 10? Then Reliable Talent does squat.

Is the DC 20? Then again, Reliable Talent does squat.

Is the DC 15? Hurray! It does something! Well... if you roll a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. So for this hypothetical Rogue, it converts a DC 15 Investigation check from failure to success 25% of the time on a normal roll, or 6% of the time on an advantage roll.

Is it an opposed roll with no preset DC? Well, then it's worth about +2 to the check (on a normal roll) or +0.7 (on an advantage roll).

And... that's about it? It's consistent in the sense that certain activities will literally never fail, but not consistent with regards to how often it actually converts failures into successes. And that matters because tier 3 Bards toss out such conversions like confetti.

Like, I get where you're coming from about spammability. But if we're just leaning on Reliable Talent here instead of bigger features, then the amount of spam we need might be a whole heckuva lot (and it still needs to fit within the goldilocks zone that Xervous describes).